Sava raises $36M Series B to retire the fingerstick

London’s Sava has raised a $36M Series B led by Ascensia Diabetes Care – with Balderton Capital, Norrsken VC, Simplyhealth Ventures, JamJar Investments and Pentland Ventures participating – to scale manufacturing of its glucose microsensor and prepare a European commercial launch.

Diabetes hardware is one of the hardest markets a European startup can pick: two American giants own the shelf, and regulators decide when you are allowed to sell. And yet a London team of bioengineers has just convinced one of the industry’s own incumbents to fund its challenger – and to sell the product for them. Below, I lay out the round, the sensor behind it, and why the corporate cheque is the most interesting line in the announcement.

A lead investor with the sales force built in

Sava announced the $36M Series B on 9 October 2026. The round is led by Ascensia Diabetes Care, the Basel-based maker of the CONTOUR blood glucose meters and a member of PHC Group, with Balderton Capital, Norrsken VC, Simplyhealth Ventures, JamJar Investments and Pentland Ventures all participating. It takes the company’s total raised to roughly $68M since 2019 (company announcement, 9 October 2026).

The capital goes to manufacturing scale-up and commercial readiness, in the company’s words, ahead of a pivotal clinical study planned for this year. And the round arrives with a commercial agreement stapled to it: Ascensia becomes Sava’s commercialisation and distribution partner, starting in Europe, with a launch subject to CE approval.

“Microsensor technology has the potential to transform the day-to-day monitoring experience for people with diabetes,” said Peter Bodlund, chief executive of Ascensia, in the announcement. For a company that sells in more than 90 countries, that sentence is a statement of intent, not a courtesy.

Ten times shorter than a CGM filament

Sava builds a wearable microsensor that reads molecules in the fluid just beneath the skin, continuously and without the fingerstick. The company says its microsensors are around ten times shorter than the filaments used in conventional continuous glucose monitors, which means less skin disruption, and that the design is built for large-scale manufacturing. Glucose comes first; the same platform is built to track other biomarkers, with ketones, lactate and cortisol on the company’s own list.

The company was founded in 2019 by Renato Circi and Rafaël Michali, two bioengineers trained at Imperial College London, and spent five years in stealth before surfacing in June 2024. The team already counted more than 60 people by mid-2025 (company announcement, July 2025). The funding history runs through Balderton at every step: an $8M seed in June 2024, then a $19M Series A in July 2025 co-led by Balderton and Pentland Ventures (company announcements, 2024-2025).

The clinical story is why a strategic is paying attention. In a study of 46 people with Type 1 and insulin-dependent Type 2 diabetes, run across sites in Oxford and Cambridge, the sensor held glucose accuracy within 0.8 percentage points of a comparator CGM over a full 10-day wear (company clinical update, February 2026). The regulatory target is the hard version: CE approval for non-adjunctive use, meaning a sensor accurate enough to dose insulin from, with no fingerstick confirmation. “For decades, continuous monitoring has been held back by the same legacy technology. This is about to change,” said Circi.

A $12.4bn market compounding at 16.3%

The market Sava is walking into is large and still accelerating: continuous glucose monitoring was worth $12.4bn globally in 2025 and is forecast to reach $55.5bn by 2035, a 16.3% CAGR over 2026-2035 (Global Market Insights, April 2026). Growth like that at this scale is rare in medtech, and it explains why a distribution incumbent would rather fund the next sensor than watch it ship without them.

For scale against our own records, this is the second health Series B of the week after Yazen’s €50M round led by Verdane, and it dwarfs the week’s other medtech device round, MintNeuro’s €4.45M raise led by Odyssey Ventures on 7 October. At $36M, Sava sits near the top of this week’s European table – you can browse the rest in our fundraising data.

What a corporate cheque at Series B signals

So what is the pattern here? European medtech hardware keeps hitting the same wall at growth stage: the science gets funded, the scale-up does not, and the category leaders are American. Sava’s answer is to take strategic capital early and trade a slice of independence for the two things a sensor company cannot build quickly – a regulated distribution network and a brand pharmacists already stock.

The good news is that the deal is structured Europe-first: Ascensia leads the commercial launch on this side of the Atlantic once the CE mark lands, rather than the familiar script where a European device debuts in the US market. We are also seeing generalist European funds – Balderton, Norrsken, JamJar – stay at the table next to a strategic rather than getting washed out, which is what a healthy cap table looks like at this stage.

What to watch now: the pivotal study, the commercialisation window the company puts at 18 to 24 months (company announcement, 9 October 2026), and whether other European incumbents start writing Series B cheques instead of waiting to acquire. Watch this one closely – if a London lab barely two years out of stealth can turn an incumbent into its sales force, the playbook travels. The opportunity is clear.